In Germany's corporate landscape, Karin Radstrom (pictured above) is an exception rather than the rule. The 43-year-old Swedish engineer has reached the top of German truck maker Daimler where she's a member of the executive board.

If you want to believe a recent survey conducted by the AllBright Foundation, the competition for female talent like Radstrom is getting tough — in regard to both management positions and skilled jobs on the factory floor.

AllBright, a German-Swedish nonprofit organization with headquarters in Stockholm and Berlin, titled its report "Struggle for the best brains: Competition for female board members heats up." It reveals a mixed picture of women's roles in the 160 companies listed on Germany's stock market.

Of the 40 corporations in the blue-chip DAX index, three achieved an equitable number of male and female board members by September 2022 — Continental, Fesenius Medical Care and Siemens Healthineers. Another three companies – Beiersdorf, Deutsche Telekom, Mecedes Benz — came at least close to having 40% of women on their boards.

The report, however, also found that more than half of all publicly listed German firms on the country's stock market didn't have a single woman in a senior executive position. Smaller companies on the SDAX and MDAX indices, in particular, were still found to be ignoring "the sign of the times," AllBright Foundation wrote.

'Male-dominated corporate culture'

As European businesses struggle with high energy costs and weakening competitiveness, the future "isn't looking rosy anymore," AllBright founder Sven Hagströmer said in the report.

The former founder and chairman of investment company Creades and online broker Avanza thinks that businesses can no longer afford to maintain a "male-dominated corporate culture" that ignores female management talent and refuses to give women a fair chance.

"The future belongs to companies that are able to constantly change and stay at the head of the race for female talent," he wrote.

Women climbing up, but slowly

AllBright found that over the past year, the number of women in the boardrooms of Germany's 160 publicly listed firms rose by just 0.8%. Overall, numbers reached 14.2% by September 2022.

The increase, small as it was, was solely attributable to the 40 biggest companies in the DAX index which were able to boost their female executive quotas by 2.8% to a total of 20.2%. The number of women among newly hired executives was larger, though, with 40%.

On the MDAX index of German midcap companies, the number of female executives stagnated at 11.3%. A similar figure of 10.4% showed growth stalling among smaller companies listed on the SDAX. Many of those companies were unable last year to replace departing female managers with new women, the report said.

Germany lagging far behind in global comparison

Despite being Europe's economic powerhouse and industrial leader, Germany ranks close to the bottom in a list of countries with corporate policies conducive to women.

By comparison, in the United States women hold 31% of all top management positions, followed by the UK (27.9%) and Sweden (26.5%), according to AllBrigth figures. Germany's 20.2% are only undercut by Poland's 16.1% among major industrialized countries.

On a global scale, an emerging skills gap and the economic crisis are "challenging German companies like never before," the report's authors, Wiebke Ankersen and Christian Berg, wrote. "It's essential, more than ever, to win over the best brains — including first and foremost those of women," they said.

Job preferences

The authors urged especially small- and mid-sized companies without female managers to speed up efforts to recruit women. "The trend among women to prefer management jobs in companies with a female boardroom culture has been manifesting itself this year," they wrote, adding that female candidates are generally hard to find.

"Companies that take measures now to become more attractive to women will not only boost their female quotas but also benefit from a larger diversity of perspectives."

Every year, about 100 executive positions are reshuffled in Germany's 160 publicly listed companies, Ankersen and Berg have calculated. They've compiled a red list of German firms where female management roles are conspicuously absent, while green and yellow lists signify companies that have improved their attractiveness for women. An open and inclusive corporate culture, wasn't only important for women but for male candidates for top jobs, too, they said.

And yet, the authors of the new AllBright survey are not harboring illusions about a speedy improvement of the numbers. "At the average pace of change over the past five years, it would take another 26 years to bring female executive numbers to 50% for the 160 publicly listed German companies," they wrote. And due to the acute slowdown over the past year, the 50% goal wouldn't be achieved "for the next 42 years."

This article was originally written in German